Kris Richards prospects for gold in
telephone bills. He seldom finds a big
vein, but the little nuggets he digs up are
more than chump change.
Consider:
Not long ago, Richards
and his Reno-based firm,
Insight Technology
Solutions, were hired to
sort through a thick stack
of phone bills from a trash
hauler in Texas who was
searching for potential savings.
Right off, Richards noticed that the
54-employee office had 50 phone lines.
Most companies, he's found during his
two decades in the phone business, average
about one line for every two employees.
Tracking down the lines one by one,
his company found 17 extras most of
them lines once used for modems that
long since had disappeared from the
office.
At more than $20 per line, that wasn't
bad.
And while Insight Technology
Solutions employees were at it, they
found another $100 a month from the
accumulation of modest billing errors.
The upshot? Savings of about $500 a
month for the trash hauler savings
that will continue even after Richards'
share is paid.
Line-by-line scrutiny of telephone use
and page-by-page scrutiny of telephone
bills isn't the most popular job at most
companies. And Richards notes the job
often gets overlooked because many
companies assign management of the
telephone system to one department
information technology, for instance
while giving responsibility for the bills to
another.
"It's something that people have taken
for granted forever," Richards said a few
days ago.
And because many businesses don't
pay attention, Information Technology
Solutions has a market niche.
The company targets mid-sized companies
those that spend $5,000 to
$10,000 a month on phone service, often
from multiple locations. Smaller companies,
Richards says, typically can keep a
tight handle on phone costs because they
have relatively few lines to track. Bigger
companies are the turf of consultants far
larger than Richards' two-person operation.
Those customers agree to pay the
company a piece of the savings something
on the order of 50 percent of the
savings for 24 months or 35 percent for
six months.
Then Richards gets to work. The fattest
target, he finds, is the number of
telephone lines that are installed, used for
a while and then forgotten.
"We find things all the time that people
are paying for but forgotten," he said.
Sometimes the detective work is simple:
Richards pulls the plug on a mysterious
phone line and waits a few days to
see if anyone in the company complains.
Usually, they don't.
In some instances, Richards recommends
new telephone equipment. The
Reno office of a construction company,
for instance, followed the company's
advice to install $13,000 in equipment to
realize a $20,000 annual savings.
And in some instances, Information
Technology Solutions even wades into
the deepest thicket of telephone billing
long-distance bills with their confusing
jumble of rates and additional
charges.
Richards launched the company about
a year ago after working for several suppliers
of business telephone systems in
northern Nevada.
"I've always been an entrepreneur. I
kept seeing this opportunity," he said.
So far, the opportunity has panned out.
With about a dozen clients, Insight
Technology Solutions has been profitable
from day one.
